Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Gay Day in the US Military? Why Do We Need the Pentagon?

Pentagon holds first gay pride event

The Pentagon on Tuesday saluted open gays in the ranks, with a civilian lawyer calling on fellow homosexuals to “stretch a little” and become more visible inside the military in the drive for benefits for same-sex couples.

“We need to be as visible as we can be,” Gordon Tanner, principal deputy general counsel of the Air Force, said at the Defense Department’s first gay pride event. “Let us be a bridge to our straight allies.”

The Pentagon is not providing benefits to spouses of gay service members because federal law defines marriage as the union of one man and one woman.

The Pentagon chose Mr. Tanner and two other gays — a Marine officer and a West Point graduate — to talk about the military during the ban on open gays, known as “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and about the months since its official repeal on Sept. 20.

Capt. Phelps told of serving in Iraq with heterosexual officers who would gather Saturday nights to smoke cigars and talk about family back home. He said he had to remain quiet in the back of the room.

“By virtue of the fact that I wasn’t allowed to say anything, I was actually growing more distant from my unit,” he said. “We hear people talk about unit cohesion and how is the repeal of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ going to affect unit cohesion. I would argue it got better.”

Since enlisting in 2002, he risked being fired. But on June 15, he was at the White House “having champagne with the commander in chief,” he said.

Capt. Phelps‘ journey from being secretly gay to openly gay included taking his boyfriend to a Marine Corps ball in San Diego in November to celebrate the Corps’ 236th birthday.

Sue Fulton, who is on the board of visitors at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., where she graduated in 1980, told a standing-room crowd in the Pentagon auditorium that removing the ban is “not even a speed bump” at the academy.

The former Army officer is now communications director for OutServe, an organization of active duty and veteran gays with chapters at bases around the world.

“This is an extraordinary and special day,” Ms. Fulton said. “A lot of people seemed surprised that ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ repeal went so smoothly.”

After recounting the closeted gays she met during her service, she said: “So many of us knew those gay and lesbian soldiers, and we knew at the end of the day this wouldn’t be hard.”

Jeh Johnson, the department’s general counsel, talked about the pre-repeal surveys and indoctrination during which some troops predicted open gays would lead to a loss of unit cohesion and morality.

“Based on our review, however, we conclude these concerns about gay and lesbian service members who are permitted to be open about their sexual orientation are exaggerated and not consistent with the reported experiences of many service members,” he said. “In communications with gay and lesbian current and former service members we repeatedly heard a patriotic desire to serve and defend the nation subject to the same rules as everyone else.”

The celebration was broadcast on the Pentagon cable channel with the title “LGBT Pride Month Event.” The initials stand for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender.

The Pentagon has no figures on the number of gays in the ranks and does not count them.

84 comments:

What the fuck is going on that The Pentagon is feting a Gay Pride Event in the military? Have we lost the ability to think?

Why do we need the Pentagon?

What do they do that cannot be done and is done at a regional command level? I’ll tell you what they do. They waste money, time and create jobs for military hacks and war suppliers. The most successful part of Afghanistan was when the CIA and special forces accomplished their mission on the ground in Afghanistan.

George Patton never needed the Pentagon.

Petraeus did not need the Pentagon.

Neither did Eisenhower, Nimitz, Spruance and Douglas MacArthur

The Pentagon as every other bureaucracy in this country needs to be dismantled and replaced by regional authorities that work.There are plenty of command that could function just fine without the Pentagon. The Department of Education does not educate and the Pentagon does not fight.

They Pentagon establishment pisses away money and with their lobbyist are weakening the USA,

but this is so over the top, I hardly know not where to begin. Celebrating diversity has morphed into celebrating perversion. Actually it is worse. We have dumbed down perversion to meaninglessness. We may as well have The Pentagon hire General Sandusky to head West Point and Monsignor William Lynn as second in command, as both know how to teach young men diversity and broaden their sexual awareness.

Why is the Pentagon or any federal agency holding a pride event? The LGBT consists of private incorporated groups so that makes pride a corporate event. Since when in American history has it became legal to attach large groups of peoples from different backrounds and sexual or gender orientations to a non democratic group of private corpoarations?

My wife watched a magnificent 13 episodes of Breaking Bad yesterday, and is on the last season today. So I know something now about Breaking Bad, which, she says, is not bad. Says she has to get caught up so she's on top for this years go.

If the Supreme Court strikes down the Affordable Care Act, expect Republicans to do one thing: smile. Once, House leaders had planned to try to preserve the most popular parts of the law, like requiring insurance companies to cover people with preexisting conditions, letting young adults stay on their parents' policies, and reducing seniors' out-of-pocket drug costs. Not anymore. Now, top GOP aides tell Politico they've got no interest in re-litigating health care before the election. They want full repeal, period.

Republicans will put forward proposals for some popular health care fixes, but they'll let them slowly mosey through various committees. "We certainly aren’t going to repeat Washington Democrats’ mistake by passing a massive bill no one has read," a John Boehner spokesman says. Republicans also have cover, because some insurance companies have vowed to keep reforms in place, law or no law. Still, some privately acknowledge that the strategy could change if Democrats launch successful attacks.

My SWAG is that the Repub leadership thinks their base of support is larger (and deeper) than it is. They're translated the Tea Party megaphone into something that isn't, in fact, there.

And they keep forgetting - USA is a big country.

Democrats understand that.

Which adds but little to the conversation but I skimmed yesterday someone at the Washington Post (Cohen) claiming that the campaign was boring because the candidates were waiting quietly for events to unfold, the equation being very simple: economy good = Obama; economy bad = Romney. Events, not people, are driving this campaign. The brief above fits perfectly into that thinking.

Romney has a problem. In order to win the nomination he's adopted a set of policy positions that are antithetical to his past, stated (and, probably, true) beliefs.

He supported, and signed an excellent "Obamacare" Bill in Massachusetts.

He strongly supported Ethanol, Solar, and other Renewable Technologies.

He called Iraq a "Mess" during the 2008 Debates, and got Drubbed by McCrazy for doing so.

He supported Bush's "Comprehensive" Immigration Reform, and it's very liberal "pathway to citizenship."

It's hard to look "Strong" during, say, the Debates, when you're constantly trying to defend a position, adopted only recently out of expediency. I think the Mittster might have a couple of pretty rough debates.

Sounds like a guy you could live with. Then why support a commie charlatan over someone who strongly supports ethanol, solar and other renewable technologies and has the ability to perhaps get something done rather than just give the money away?

It seems as if the front-end guys - the candidates - are twisting in the wind while the party apparatchiks decide how to play the issues. So we have a disconnect between individuals and institutional infrastructure at the Party level - both ends. There's a distinct cleavage that may or may not have always been there.

And nowhere in that scenario is an abiding concern for country.

I hate to say it, but this election just stinks of the old paradigm of corporate money ("fat cats") vs the working/middle class.

For economists, the puzzle is not why voting participation rates are so low in voluntary systems, but why they’re so high. The so-called paradox of voting, highlighted in a 1957 book by the political scientist Anthony Downs, occurs because the probability that any individual voter can alter the outcome of an election is effectively zero. So if voting imposes any cost, in terms of time or hassle, a perfectly rational person would conclude it’s not worth doing. The problem is that if each person were to reach such a rational conclusion no one would vote, and the system would collapse.

Mandatory voting solves that collective action problem by requiring people to vote and punishing nonvoters with a fine. In Australia, the penalty starts small and rises significantly for those who repeatedly fail to vote.

Beyond simply raising participation, compulsory voting could alter the role of money in elections. Turn-out-the-vote efforts, often bankrolled by big-money groups, would become largely irrelevant. Negative advertising could be less effective, because a central aim of such ads is to discourage participation in the opponent’s camp.

In Massachusetts they are now moving toward direct rationing of services with legislation that puts an annual cap on health insurance expenditures set at a percentage of state GDP. Since politicians now control the health care system, the rationing will be politically expedient. That means health care will be rationed the severest for patients who lack political power. That is inevitably the sickest patients since they are relatively small in number and thus do not amount to many votes come election day.

The end result of this can be seen in places like Canada and Great Britain where patients most in need of care end up on waiting lists for things like heart surgery and cancer treatment. These are people who are most in need of government’s supposed guarantee of access to care. But the government falls far short of meeting that guarantee, much shorter than a free market ever would.

If you are in great pain from a flare-up of a chronic condition they may prescribe a couple of days of pain-killers, and tell you that you must engage the services of a specialist. But, they Will Not Treat a Chronic Condition.

Sorry, but not my experience, ERs in Memphis, Mississippi, and Texas treat broken arms, head colds, and pain, regardless of whether it be Chronic or not or an emergency or not. They will not turn you away.

As I said, if you go in with "pain" from a chronic condition they will give you a prescription for a couple of days worth of painkillers (after they're run a Battery of Tests - guess who pays for that?)

BUT, along about the third trip they start to get pretty grouchy. After that, things deteriorate very rapidly.

Believe me, Emergency Rooms are Expensive (somebody's got to pay,) and they Don't solve the problem of "Millions of Americans not having access to healthcare."

And, what I've been trying to explain, now, for a long time, is that it would be cheaper in the vast majority of those cases to treat them ONE Time, fix'em up, and call it a day, than to run a battery of tests (that is what they do, Every time) every week, just so they can write a couple of days of painkillers, and giv'em a stern lecture on "getting a doctor."

I have a more basic take. 96% of human beings are heterosexual. That is a significant percentage that defines normal; normal being conforming to standard and acceptable behavior. The military is not about anything if not conforming to a standard. That is what basic training is about. They are not there to celebrate their differences. They are there to conform to the standards necessary to be a soldier not to express their individuality.

The military is fairly successful at bringing a large amount of inductees to their standards but not all. People are excluded for many reasons. They are excluded because they can’t conform or refuse to or their mental or physical attitude is wrong for the military.

Sandusky and every defrocked priest are sexually outside of the norm. Most are homosexuals that perfer younger boys because they are easy targets and keep their silence, mostly out of fear and shame. We teach children to be suspicious of such men.

Men by nature and by the numbers prefer to be with woman on a 96;4 basis. That is normal. It is not normal for the vast majority of men to want to submit to or initiate sex with another man. It is repugnant to them. The very acts are demeaning. There are no celebrations of what 94% of the population does or does not do sexually. Why is the military celebrating the 4% of those on the outside of human behavior with a month devoted to this absurdity?

10% is the miltant/media number, 3-4% is most likely. If you had a family reunion of 80 people, would you expect 8 to be gay? Of course not and your family is probably not that much different than my own.

The right policy, which also happens to be the only one with any hope of being adopted in the foreseeable future, is a barbell approach, with more stimulus on one side and, on the other, more deficit reduction enacted now to take effect over time. That would attack both the weak labor market revealed in last week’s jobs report and the long-term fiscal gap that the CBO highlighted on Tuesday. If we could enact such a dual plan immediately -- which is admittedly hard to see happening, even though it has been embraced by some Republicans -- it would give us much-needed credibility in our efforts to urge the Europeans to act on their own problems before it’s too late.

"The second half of the year, unless Europe completely implodes, I'm still in the camp that the markets recover, particularly the U.S. and some of the big (emerging markets) and we could still conceivably see new highs," he said. "So we shouldn't get solely focused on the European stuff."

You know what that means. The only recourse will be for the party apparatchiks to "go juicy" with social issues and personal defamation.

Obama might be getting a little bit lucky. The implosion in Europe, and the slowdown in China (Europe is China's largest export market) are wreaking havoc on the price of oil, and, as a result, the price of gasoline in the U.S, And there is a Very Strong Correlation between Presidential Approval Ratings, and the price of gasoline.

Now, eventually, the weakness in Europe, and China will leak through into the broader U.S. economy (it already is on the East Coast, but that's pretty solidly Obamaland, anyway,) but this weakening may not start to cause a lot of pain until sometime after the Vote.

Republicans, like their nominally conservative equivalents worldwide, have been far too easily dragged onto liberal turf on the health care issue. Too often -- almost always, in fact -- they begin with the premise that the basic problems are "access to care" and "how to reduce costs." From there, the debate devolves into the conservative case for "market-based solutions" versus the liberal argument that "health care is too important to be left to the free market."

His objection being:

But don't mistake that wish to help others for a political argument. To do so is to answer "yes" to the second question I raised at the outset -- namely, "Do you own your neighbor's soul?" The moment your hope to improve the health care lot of others becomes a claim against someone else's freedom to pursue his own self-preservation through voluntary interaction, you are clamoring for the state to restrict another man's -- not to mention your own -- natural right to life. You are seeking to restrict his natural desire for life -- which is to say, you are denying him the moral status of an individual human being, an end in himself, reducing him to a mere means to others' ends. Simply stated, you are refusing to recognize the dignity of his soul.

The (legitimate) conservative position:

It is time for conservatives to stand tall on the principle that the so-called health care debate is, at its heart, a debate over freedom versus oppression.

The (illegitimate) progressive position:

The desire to restrict such dynamism in the name of a skewed, egalitarian understanding of fairness is just another manifestation of the envy and bitterness that define modern leftist psychology.

On the subject of "exploding brains" this latest Revelation from Jonescu is starkly reminiscent of the Deep Ecologists, whose anti-technology spirituality is first cousin to the 'burning dung' soulfulness of Jonescu.

But there are barriers to movement, for example many potential migrants don't speak the language of destination countries.

...

It said that many of those leaving crisis-hit countries are also relatively recent immigrants, the main exception being Ireland where English-speaking nationals have found it easier to find work in Australia and other growing economies.

The Paris-based think tank said that, based on data from municipal registers, it appears that in net terms—subtracting immigrants from emigrants—more than 50,000 people left Spain in 2011, almost reversing a 60,000 inflow in 2010. Compared with Spain's population of 46 million, that net outflow is tiny.

It probably seemed like a good idea at the time. The Democratic party would hold its 2012 nation convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, one of those battleground states that had gone blue in 2008, a rerun of which would go a long way to making Barrack Obama a two-term president.

...

Now there are, according to Justin Sink, writing in the Hill, other problems, including money.

Democrats canceled an event at the Charlotte Motor Speedway that was designed to open the Democratic National Convention this summer.

...

The official response is that ‘It's not about the money.’ And we all know what that means.

Multiple media reports say Democrats are between $20 million and $25 million short of their fundraising goal for the convention. And there is talk Democrats are struggling to pay the bills after a self-imposed ban on corporate donations.

The Chancellor's increasingly vehement opposition to the idea of sharing eurozone debt has put her on a collision course with many of her European partners, including Mr Hollande. The French President – who is expected to trumpet a shift away from "collective austerity" – believes that eurobonds should be an EU priority for helping countries like Italy and Spain bring their borrowing costs down.

...

The 27 leaders will discuss a report, "Towards a Genuine Economic and Monetary Union," by Mr Van Rompuy; José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission President; Mario Draghi, President of the European Central Bank; and Jean-Claude Juncker, who chairs the 17-strong Eurogroup.In a concession to Britain, it says further integration must be compatible with the single market.

But Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, said yesterday: "The risk of discrimination [against the UK] is real. The protection of the single currency must not translate into protectionism within the single market."

In its March 12 issue, Time magazine listed “The Rise of the Nones” as one of the biggest trends in the United States. It turns out that the fastest-growing religious group in the U.S. is Americans who list their religious affiliation as “none.”

A 2007 survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that 16 percent of Americans are unaffiliated with any religious group; about half of them could be described as secular unaffiliated. Twenty-five percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 are unaffiliated with any particular religion.

If this trend toward nonbelief continues, it’s going to be harder and harder for believers to continue to practice bigotry against atheists. Nonbelievers are their children, their relatives, friends, neighbors, and co-workers.

I think one of the reasons this campaign seems boring to some is that we have one foot in the future and one foot in the past. Atari 40 yrs ago and nanotech ?? yrs in the future. Instead of solving problems and moving forward, the country is gnashing its ideological gums. It's boring as shit. Jonesy waxes intellectual about the sanctity of the soul. The Left?? They kind of get the general drift of history but not sure how to respond to it.

History is moving at break neck speed. The political parties, struggling to keep up.

Officials and analysts said Ms. Merkel is coming under more direct pressure at top-level meetings as the crisis gets worse and since the departure of former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who had helped keep proposals strongly opposed by Berlin off the table at summits.

...

"The danger is that the Germans at some point get into a corner and say 'no,' and they [the leaders] don't come out with a compromise," says Janis Emmanouilidis, senior policy analyst at the European Policy Centre in Brussels. For this summit, however, he still expects leaders to avoid a direct clash and agree on some steps to address the crisis.

"There are signs from the top level of the German government—the chancellery and the finance ministry—that they are ready to go into the direction of some levels of banking union," namely limited funding for winding down failing banks in return for transferring oversight to a powerful supervisor, Mr. Emmanouilidis said. But he said joint European guarantees for bank deposits, which many analysts say are needed to restore confidence in debt-ridden countries, are probably a long way off.

Tomorrow, the Supreme Court is expected to hand down its ruling on Obamacare--and, in particular, the individual mandate, which requires individuals to purchase health insurance whether they want it or not.

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Andrew Jackson’s veto message of a bill to recharter the Bank of the United States stands to this day as a kind of mission statement for the modern party, and it is worth quoting at length (emphasis mine):

It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government.

...

If the Court allows Washington to mandate commerce in order to regulate it, this will open new, terrible avenues for the Democrats to pay off their client groups, at the expense of the public good. Today it is a mandate to buy a policy from Aetna; but who knows what tomorrow may bring?

Magnificent Ronald and the Founding Fathers of al Qaeda

“These gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America’s founding fathers.” — Ronald Reagan while introducing the Mujahideen leaders to media on the White house lawns (1985). During Reagan’s 8 years in power, the CIA secretly sent billions of dollars of military aid to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan in a US-supported jihad against the Soviet Union. We repeated the insanity with ISIS against Syria.